Advancing independent research on AI alignment

As AI systems become more capable and more autonomous, alignment research needs to both keep pace and scale diversity. At OpenAI, we invest heavily in frontier alignment and safety research as it is critical to our mission. We also believe that ensuring that AGI is safe and beneficial to everyone cannot be achieved by any single organization and want to support independent research and conceptual approaches that can be pursued outside of frontier labs.

Today, we’re announcing a $7.5 million grant to The Alignment Project⁠(opens in a new window), a global fund for independent alignment research created by the UK AI Security Institute (UK AISI). Renaissance Philanthropy is supporting the grant’s administration. This contribution helps make The Alignment Project one of the largest dedicated funding efforts for independent alignment research to date and strengthens the broader, independent ecosystem.

Frontier labs like OpenAI are in a unique position to pursue alignment research that depends on access to frontier models and significant compute—work that is often difficult for independent researchers to explore. We devote much of our internal alignment effort to developing scalable methods so that alignment progress keeps pace with capability progress. We believe iterative deployment—gradually increasing capabilities while strengthening safeguards—helps surface problems early and gives us concrete evidence about what works in practice, and that responsible development requires significant alignment and safety work that is tightly integrated with model building and deployment.

Our funding does not create a new program or selection process, nor influence the existing process; it increases the number of already-vetted, high-quality projects⁠(opens in a new window) that can be funded in the current round.